Wall-E Supervising Animator Tells His Story 228
Denofgeek wrote in to tell us about their story where "Pixar's supervising animator Angus MacLane gives an interesting interview about the technical challenges in bringing Wall-E to the screen. Plus he squeezes in a bit on his love of Lego, too..."
Shorts (Score:1, Interesting)
Rated G! (Score:5, Interesting)
Definitely makes you think, though! And the animation was absolutely breathtaking at times.
Re:Shorts (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes. I have never seen a Pixar movie in the theater. I don't often see kid movies and I *hate* animation movies. But this one struck me as good and interesting. Why? Lack of humans. Of course, the last 1/3 was full of humans but that was far better than every other Pixar movie. It is painful for me to watch CGI humans.
I know, I know. I'm in the minority. Wall*e was by far the best animated Pixar movie to date. The rest were just okay.
Great stuff! (Score:5, Interesting)
What I found most interesting about TFA was about the software they use for long-term development.
It said that for long-term development movies (Wall-E was 3 years, right?) they use the same software all the way through. I had always wondered about that kind of thing.. Since 3D software and rendering engines and such is always improving, how do these guys make the movies? Do they constantly re-render with the better software throughout the process, etc.? How do they keep up with competition in that regard?
So it was neat to finally find that out. The article also offers a lot of insight into the team arrangement at Pixar. I like that they aren't chained to animating a certain character/part- That they really observe who likes to animate who and what kind of scenes and kind of let them do what they enjoy best in the project. I wish programming jobs were like that- Where we could work on parts that we really liked instead of being moved from language to language and to different teams etc. like our preference doesn't matter. I think it's a really good thing they have over there.
If you haven't seen Wall-E yet, it's well worth the ticket price!
Re:Rated G! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Rated G! (Score:2, Interesting)
It wasn't social commentary. The parallels to real life are obvious but the director and writers have taken a beating over whether this was social commentary. NPR's Fresh Air did a fantastic interview with the director who went out of his way to explain the genesis of the story and that it was NOT social commentary of any kind. In fact, the story was written long before global warming/pollution was even a hot topic. This movie shouldn't get shackled with popular politics just because of the coincidence.
Re:Rated G! (Score:5, Interesting)
I hadn't really read up on it before viewing it and had no idea it was going to be an entire social commentary-esque movie.
Actually, I listened to a really good interview NPR did with Andrew Stanton (director and co-author of Wall-E) [npr.org] and at one point he discusses that the story never was intended to be a social commentary on environmentalism. The story was written about a decade ago and while it certainly has the universal theme of protecting nature, he primarily used the concept of a polluted planet to avoid having to give some other explanation for humans leaving the planet that would have been to heavy for a children's movie (ie: global war).
Re:Rated G! (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. In SF the useful commentary is still hidden deeply. It just takes place in a world taken to the extreme. Some people call the extreme world ham-fisted, but that is just the environment which allows more creativity to permit more allegorical setup and therefore the higher amount of useful commentary. Those who object to it are too easily distracted or not comprehending of how handy it is to have a fantasy world.
In other forms of literature the amount of commentary is small, weak, and puny, because it has difficulty flexing its wings in a world constrained by reality.
thought experiment: consider classic works of strong-commentary literature and whether they would be considered SF if published today, or whether they would be even stronger if given the freedom of SF
That boot and tree (Score:2, Interesting)
Wall-E is an ayahuasca trip. Right after Wall-E finds the vine in the boot (traveling vine) a bunch of explosions right out of Altered States happen. Then we meet a white angel/alien thing right out of psychedelic literature. Then they undergo joseph Campbell's archetypal hero journey, complete with death and rebirth and the experience of the self as an object in the machinations of a higher order self. When wall-e and eve are watching that tree with the root in the vine in the boot, that is much more a symbol about hallucinogen use revealing esoteric mystical secrets and uniting the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality then anything social or ecological.
The movie also works as a drug trip, where the movie is the trip that inspired the director to create the film as social commentary. wall-e is the persona, Eve is Anima, The captain is the soul in charge, the axiom is the engrained pattern of thinking in one person, the ecological stuff is a parable about psychological debris, the earth is the body. When the ship comes to earth, it's the psyche returning to the body, where the director/captain spreads ecological wisdom. The first thing wall-e does when brought back to life after being reprogrammed by the unconscious aspect of personality is make a junk cube with a rubiks cube in it. Then we see that vine and tree. This movie works as social commentary, but it encodes the psychedelic hero's journey. I think this is the deepest meaning of the film.
The movie also works as a commentary of the drug war (as the rogue robots try and keep the plant from auto, which will let the people wake up and be free.)
Those end credits are a rosetta stone to decipher the film. The same forces that we saw as aspects of one personality (in the ayahuasca interpretation) and characters in one film are presented throughout history and as archetypes.
Re:Shorts (Score:5, Interesting)
And now, in Wall*E, the people (for the most part) have a very cartoony bubbly look, which is obviously intentional to represent how far the human race has degenerated during the time it has been waited on hand and foot by robots in space. The obviousness of that intent is highlighted by the fact that in the line up of photos of all of the previous captains, the first one was very realistic looking, and they gradually get more cartoony and fat from there. Also, all of the videos of Fred Willard are actual videos of the actor, not animations. That serves to further show the contrast between what humans were and what they have become. I think when Toy Story came out, they were focused on showing off this new medium and how realistic it can be, so they tried to even make the people lifelike, which was hard to do. So in subsequent movies, they've avoided the Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org] by making the humans cartoonish in different ways, depending on the theme of the movie.
Re:Rated G! (Score:3, Interesting)
I took my two kids, aged 4 and 1 (well, 22 months old) on the opening Saturday at 9:30. They both were entranced. Visually speaking, it was enough constant motion and humor and bouncing around for the 1 year old to love it. The 4 year old immediately bonded with the main character, Wall-E, and his interest, Eve.
Sure, it might be a bit heavy for kids, but they're just going to miss all the heavy stuff anyway. Pixar wasn't shooting for social commentary, they've come out and said they were working on these concepts since 1993. If you put on your rose colored glasses and pretend Clinton was president, a lot of the issues we read into a modern movie aren't present. "Using up the planet" today implies fossil fuels, but then, it was just about recycling so we had smaller landfills. The whole "obesity" thing wasn't an issue -- but we were talking about building a space station and the impact of prolonged exposure to low-Gs and space travel.
If you're interested, Terri Gross interviewed Andrew Stanton a few weeks ago and they touched on this kind of misinterpretation / reinterpretation. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92400669 [npr.org]
Re:More than taking care of the planet (Score:3, Interesting)
In Dash's case, he's complaining about having to lower himself to the level of regular people (and thus competing on regular human terms), while Syndrome is talking about raising regular people to the level of superheroes through technology, thus competing with the Supers based on powers.
In the end, Dash learns that family and being a regular kid (but still having his unique personality) is more important than showing off and being the fastest runner.
Re:More than taking care of the planet (Score:1, Interesting)
No, they were shown as not being gratful for the positive impact that people with special talents can make. Chastising the people with gifts because they are different, and misunderstood.
If everyone is special, and has the same capabilities, then let someone else do it. And if we are all basically the same, why should I push to be the best I can be. Why try to be different? Why try to be special? Why try to accomplish something that no one else has done? Why try to think of a truly new idea? If someone can get C's without trying, why should they try to get an A?
But, he didn't try to win, he just wanted to play with the other kids. Remember the beginning of the movie he wasn't allowed to play because he expose what he inherently was. It's like a kid who can do Calculus being held in a math class were everyone is still learning how to do multiplication. We often think about how we're not allowing those with disadvantage opportunities, but we don't think about how we might be depriving those with talent.
Re:More than taking care of the planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Incredibles - Exceptionalism should be rewarded
The message of the film is that mediocrity is celebrated.
I really had issues with the Incredibles message. Unlike Wall-E the average human was portrayed as weak-willed, contemptible, and ungracious for not heaping glory on their superhuman betters. The line from the kid, "when everyone's special then nobody is" I found to be a pretty horrible statement, the implication being that he can't really shine unless everyone else is inferior in every way.
s/every/some. But yes, that is true. It may not be pleasant, or nice, but it is true. It's kind of the definition of special really. And you know what? The average human is weak willed, ungracious and contemptible. In the film, it's not that they didn't heap praise, it's that they forced them away. They forced the incredibles to be as mediocre as they were. That is what people are like.
Much as I don't particularly like it, I'm like that too, to some extent. Have you never felt ill will towards someone who got/achieved something you didn't manage to do? If you ever have, then you have those tendencies too.
And the race at the end, I didn't really see the point; it takes no effort to win, all he gets from winning is the dubious recognition of having won an elementary school race.
So the best guy shouldn't win, so everyone else can have a chance? Why shouldn't he win? Because there's nothing special about special? Because the mediocre people should be celebrated too? Your comment is the point of the film.
Presto and Portal (Score:3, Interesting)
As I watched the short Presto I couldn't help but imagine a guy at Pixar playing Portal on their lunch break and going "Hey, I've got an idea!"